


it is not in the stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves

by MedicalAssisstanceSpareChange



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Gen, Gifts, Implied Romance, Post-Apocalypse, Pre-Apocalypse, Stars, mentions of death/pedicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-06-27 10:48:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19789312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MedicalAssisstanceSpareChange/pseuds/MedicalAssisstanceSpareChange
Summary: In the Beginning, Crowley made the stars, and they stayed when he Fell.That is, until they didn't.





	it is not in the stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this entire thing in literally an hour, fueled off of anger and spite towards the end of Stranger Things season three. While it mostly follows the TV show, as I haven't read the book in a few years, I think some book elements snuck in there;  
> I'm not sure, though. It's quite late and I am exhausted.
> 
> Some basics: a) this follows the headcanon that Crowley made the stars as an angel and b) is inspired by a question/headcanon on the tumblr blog raphhael (post here: https://raphhaels.tumblr.com/post/186240066528/two-crowley-ideas-one-angst-crowley-made-the ) Also the title is a Shakespeare quote that I felt fit Good Omens a bit too well, if not this story in particular.
> 
> Also, this is my first fic for this fandom! It's also very different from my usual style and hasn't been beta'd, although I did my best on the editing. As such, I deeply appreciate any feedback y'all might have. Thanks for reading <3 you can find me on tumblr at firstaidquarters!

If nothing else, Crowley has always had the stars.

He thinks, sometimes, back to Eden, the first night he’d spent on Earth, the hours spent gazing up and for once thinking not of the pain of Falling, but of the joy of creating. Clouds and light pollution hadn’t been invented yet, so he’d slithered up a tall tree and poked his head above the leaves and stared at his creations. 

It made him feel better. He’d Fallen for so little, but at least She had spared what he built. It was the first thing to ease the pain of Falling, and on that first night, the stars became his constant source of comfort.

Many years later, but not terribly many, he learns that the humans have started using the stars to navigate and to keep track of time, and he’s oddly proud of himself. Crowley half hopes he’ll bump into Aziraphale the night he learns this, because it seems like a good thing to tease the angel with. Crowley, a demon, made the stars; a demon is the reason humanity is succeeding at things like keeping track of history and finding new places to live.

But Aziraphale is off elsewhere in the world. Crowley doesn’t mind too much; he drinks the whole bottle of wine himself and dances in the light of that which he created.

Perhaps it’s not his imagination that they shine a bit brighter that night.

It's been forty days and nights. Crowley has practically forgotten what the sky looked like, holed up as he is in the bottom of the Ark. He’d laid low as to not draw any Divine attention to himself, but when the rain stops, he isn't able to help himself.

He needs to see them. He needs to see what he made, to be reassured that not all of him had been lost in the Fall and in the dying screams of the drowning children. Needs to be reminded that the vast Earth hasn’t turned into lonely, cruel Hell under all that dark water. Most of all, he needs to be reassured that She is still benevolent, still loving, even if She is ineffable.

When he sees the starlight reflected on the water, he nearly cries.

The horizon is merely a concept, unnoticeable in the moonless and flooded world. As a result, the stars look like they surround the Ark both above and below, surround  _ him _ , twinkling and full of comfort and as bright as the day he made them. Innumerable in number, ineffable that they remain; but Crowley will take any blessing he can get, in these lonely times. Aziraphale has gone back to heaven, and the children are dead; all Crowley has left is the stars that look so beautiful on the calm water.

“Hello?” The voice comes from behind him, and for a single crazy moment, Crowley thinks the stars must be talking to him. But when he turns around, he sees one of Noah’s grandchildren instead, staring at him warily, and that’s just as good.

Crowley’s part of why children exist, after all. He has a soft spot for them. 

“Hello,” he says back with a quiet smile, unfolding his wings so the child won’t call out in alarm. In this dark night, it’ll be hard enough to tell if they’re black or white, demon or angel.  The child’s face instantly softens, and Crowley reaches out a gentle hand to beckon her forwards. She ends up taking it, standing next to him. 

“What are you doing here?” she asks, staring at him, as he stares out over the rail of the Ark. For a long moment, he is silent.

“Some things you just can’t properly appreciate if you’re not on Earth,” he finally tells her. “I made the stars, back in the beginning; sometimes I like to just look at them.” It’s true, all of it. He tries to make a habit of mostly lying to Hell, and there’s no reason to not tell the truth here.

“I don’t know anything about stars,” the girl confesses, turning to stare at sea and sky. Crowley crouches down next to her, and points out a small cluster- a little constellation he particularly enjoyed making- and for hours the two remain there, on the gently rocking Ark over calm starry seas, and Crowley tells her the secrets of the stars he made and loves.

Things go bad after that. 

With the recession of the waters, Crowley is told to stop slacking and get back to tempting. Aziraphale returns, thankfully, to help put a pause on that; they don’t see each other often, but Crowley enjoys himself immensely when they do. Jesus is born, and Crowley shows him the world, tells him about the stars as well; then he’s dead, for telling people to be kind.

Crowley wonders sometimes if he made that happen.

Then it’s Rome, and the wars, the endless conquests, the humans proving en masse their ability to sin and darken the world far beyond any demon’s power. Crowley’s only in Rome to get the commendation by proxy, and thus get Hell off his back for a bit. He’s not expecting to run into Aziraphale, or to feel better about life suddenly with a simple offer of dinner. He’s not expecting to walk around with the angel after oysters and wine.

He’s unconsciously steered them into some noble’s private gardens- getting the angel to do a bit of rule-breaking has always been a goal of his. Here, there’s no torches, no sconces or lanterns, and the world is dark around them.

For the first time in far too long, Crowley has someone else to appreciate the stars with him. At least, he thinks he does; Aziraphale isn’t stopping his drunken ramble about stars and creation and nebulas, at least, even when he starts getting into the finer points of weaving and balancing galaxies. It’s enough for him to keep going, and when Aziraphale finds them a soft patch of grass to flop down onto so they can better stare up at the sky, it’s even encouragement.

“Tha- tha’ one’sss... Sirius. Think so.” Crowley squints at a bright point, trying to stop the points of light from spinning and blurring together. His finger waves vaguely north. “Then th’ North Star- tha’s Polaris, the humans call it! Polaris.” He draws out the syllables, delighting in how people use his creations. “An’ that one-”

“Which one?” Aziraphale asks after a moment, when Crowley falls silent. “My dear?”

Crowley sobers himself up a bit, squints harder at the sky. At the suddenly very dark spot where a star most definitely used to be.

“Crowley, is everything all right?” Aziraphale prompts, and he’s sat himself up a bit and suddenly Crowley is overwhelmed, panicking almost, because a star is gone and he doesn’t know where or why or when. He turns to Aziraphale, glasses off because he’s drunk, and his fear is clear to see on his face and he knows it because he can see Aziraphale sobering himself up.

“It’s gone,” he mumbles, turning back to the sky as Aziraphale tries to calm him down and question him at the same time. “The- the star, it didn’t have a name, it’s gone. Where’d the star go?” But there’s no answer, not from Her, not from him.

As soon as his commendation comes from Hell, he flees Rome and the horrible memories.

It’s a few years later he learns what happened.

He’s in some desert somewhere; gone east, for nostalgia’s sake he supposes. He spends many nights staring up lately, trapped the memory of Falling or the disappearance of his star or whatever new human atrocity he’s heard of this time. He’s staring up at the sky now, thoughts running at the speed of light in the back of his head, and he would know, he measured how fast light moves back when he made art out of stardust and fire so he knew how to make it all look how he wanted.

Then, above him, a star brightens for a brief moment, before blinking out of existence.

Crowley scrambles to sit upright, peering intently into the new dark spot. The flare left a mark on his vision, a cruel negative that floats over his field of view so that when he blinks, it is the only star he sees. The spot fades, eventually, but the empty piece of sky remains, another question boring into whatever he has in place of a soul.

For the first time, Crowley willingly leaves Earth. He’s aware he’ll get into a heaven of a lot of trouble for this; he doesn’t care. He needs to know. He’s always needed to know, and this more than anything.

It’s the biggest miracle he’s worked since Falling. Teleporting oneself to another galaxy is no small feat, and he just hopes he can keep his body from depressurizing once he’s there. 

Instead, when he gets there, he has to worry about gravity, because he’s teleported into the middle of his dear creation’s implosion, stardust and light swirling around him and unable to escape its own doom, trying to draw him in with it all. He moves again, a safer distance away, near the comfort of another star, and watches as the dying one finally consumes itself.

He leaves when it starts pulling in nearby objects. 

He feels betrayed. God hadn’t spared his creations, simply left them to die slowly, unattended to after his Fall. He feels scared; after all, the number of stars is finite, and how quickly are they going? Will there someday be a starless sky, a world where Crowley has nothing to remind himself that there’s still hope? He feels angry, and he feels like crying, and when he miracles himself back to Earth he does just that for a long while in the desert where no one will find him. Mostly, he feels lost.

Mostly, he can’t stop thinking of that black hole where the star once shone, and how it took everything within reach into its maw. It reminds him of temptation; a slow pull at first, then faster, and all at once you’re lost. It reminds him of how the humans, left more or less to their own devices, destroy themselves.

Mostly, thinking about the way it took in everything without discrimination, it reminds him of Falling.

For a long time, he doesn’t look at the stars. He sleeps instead, slipping into unconsciousness when the reminders of his dying creations start to appear in the sky.

He learns to love sleep.

He can’t help looking up, though, sometimes.

Light pollution becomes a problem, as does smog during the Industrial Revolution. He sleeps through the latter half of that time period, utterly done with the world and the loss of his stars one by one by one, done with Hell and quite frankly everything. But when he finally does wake up, the world is very changed, and the skies are too.

Crowley spends his first night awake staring up, for the first time in centuries, and as much as he feels like crying his face stays dry.

He learned long ago to not cry over human failings, after all, or he’d never stop weeping. And as much as he’d like to blame God for this particular event, he’s not even sure whether it’s a blessing or a curse. To be unable to see as most of his creations wink out of existence, one by one; is it a kindness to remain unaware of the slow death of his part in creation, or cursing him to not know how little he has left to look up to?

He can’t decide. Aziraphale finds him and is delighted and far too emotional, even for his reserved angelic self. He insists on dinner, and Crowley, overwhelmed by change and more than a bit lonely, accepts.

It’s some fancy place, not Crowley’s type, but he’s all too content to listen to Aziraphale chatter about the wonderful new things happening in the world. It’s nice to argue over whose side did or didn’t do this and that, to teasingly spat over semantics and virtues and sins. It’s familiar, and something that helps Crowley feel connected, even if it’s just to the plump little angel across the table. It’s something he needs.

They get drunk, as they usually do. They go wandering, and Crowley steers them into a garden out of habit. He likes gardens; they remind him of happier times, in the beginning when nothing was really so bad.

“Do you remember the first time we did this in Rome?” Aziraphale asks out of the blue.

Crowley looks up at the smog-filled and cloudless sky. “I miss those stars of yours,” Aziraphale admits, resting a hand on Crowley’s arm. “Sometimes I think there’s less of them than there used to be, you know, but that’s probably just me being silly.”

“It’s not,” Crowley says, unwillingly sober again, and his voice is so tight and pained that he can _feel_ Aziraphale sober up next to him.

“My dear boy,” Aziraphale breathes in shock, and the hand on Crowley’s arm turns supportive. “I- I’m so-”

“S’not your fault,” Crowley says thickly. Tilting his head back and closing his eyes when the stars remain out of view. Rage fills him, then, sudden and nearly righteous, shakes him to his core. “It’s  _ Hers _ , she left them up there all alone, didn’t bother asking one of your precious angels to check up on them, did you?! Did you!” He’s yelling at the sky now, shaking Aziraphale off him; he needs to do this, needs to let God know just what he thinks of her. “No, you just let them die up there, one by one, eating each other up and all alone! You’re a cruel bastard, you know, letting me have this one thing from before and then just taking it from me like that, like-”

“Crowley,  _ really _ ,” Aziraphale huffs, but he's concerned.

“ALL I DID WAS ASK QUESTIONS!” He’s howling now, anguished, desperate to see his stars and see what’s left. The skies miraculously clear; it takes only a quick sweep and a few moments of thinking to realize that another several dozen have gone in the past century. “I just wanted to know, that's all! THAT'S ALL I DID! You said you’d test the humans! The humans, not  _ me! _ Not the demons! Why?! Why do you keep  _ doing _ this?”

“Oh, my dear boy.” Aziraphale’s voice is soft, and Crowley realizes he’s crying when the angel cups his cheek. 

“What’s she _doing_ this for, angel?” he croaks, turning to face his sorrowful counterpart. “I- why? What purpose could this possibly serve?” For a long moment, Aziraphale simply stares at him, face twitching as he searches for an answer they’d both be happy with.

Finally he simply sighs and drops his hand. “It’s ineffable, I suppose,” he murmurs, and he doesn’t bother trying to break the silence that comes after.

He thinks, sometimes, back to Eden, and to earlier. To Falling. 

Heaven was Above, yes, but not in any material or physical sense of the word. Still, while Falling, he was certain the stars had flashed past him as he plummeted to Hell. A sense of downward motion, implied by his own creations, accentuated by the other figures dropping around him into their new roles as adversaries of Good.

The stars, though. They’d given him a sliver of wonder, of hope, even as everything else slipped away. They’d seemed to say,  _ you’re not entirely lost. _ They’d said,  _ we are still here, and we are you, and we will remain _ .

Crowley stares up at the dwindling sky sometimes and wonders which will run out first: him, or the constellations.

Crowley finds himself staring up at the stars again. The real ones, this time, not the floating pages of the astronomy book Aziraphale had gotten him a few years back. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to get rid of it; even if so many of his creations were missing, at least here he could see what they looked like up close again. The fact that humans couldn’t take such crystal-clear pictures yet didn’t matter; Crowley knew what the pictures were supposed to look like, so they looked like it.

Tonight, the world is moving on from the apocalypse. Tonight, an angel is staying over at his flat, because a bookshop has burned down.

Crowley wonders what Aziraphale holds onto, in that moment. The angel never made anything, so far as Crowley is aware; he has nothing connecting him to heaven in that way. Then again, he never fell; perhaps he doesn’t need it.

Still, Crowley can’t help but think that the look of loss on his face is a painfully familiar one.

Then the next day happens; the switch, the trials, the warnings. Crowley delights in breathing fire at Gabriel and Uriel and Sandalphon; he laughs with glee when Aziraphale describes ordering Michael around. A bit of rule-breaking, indeed!

They part ways for a few hours before dinner. Crowley stands in his garden, for once not terrorizing the plants with anything more than a nasty glare, and remembers what not being permanently on edge feels like. The room is warm, like Eden was, and though the stars won’t be out for another several hours he already knows that tonight he will stare at them once more.

Dinner is lovely. The toast is a particularly good one, and for once, he doesn’t mind being called a little bit good. It’s true, after all.

Aziraphale suggests a walk. Crowley’s all too happy to accept, still reeling a bit from his angel’s discorporation and the summoning of Satan and the sheer humanity of Adam. Still reeling at ineffability, and the fact that the world is still there, and most of his stars are too. Thousands have died in the past six millenia, of the ones he can see from Earth; but he made millions, _billions_ , enough to last till the next Armageddon.

He hardly even notices when they end up in St. James Park, near one of the flowery bits by the water. He’s drunk off champagne and success, laughing wildly with the angel over some funny bit of wiling and thwarting that happened back in the early 200’s, when he sees it.

The night is clear; Adam’s left a bit of his work up, and London skies are the least polluted they’ve been in a hundred and twenty years. Summer heat means no clouds, and the stars shine down from the sky, fighting through the light pollution to reflect off the dark water.

Just to be sure, Crowley miracles the nearest few lampposts into darkness. Aziraphale falls silent next to him, looking out over the water as well.

For a moment, he thinks he’s hallucinating. But looking up confirms it: there’s a star where there once was an empty spot, shining bright and beautiful as the day he made it- and there, down by the tail of Ursa Major, is the one that died in the middle of 1403, and there, and there…

“I gave Adam a ring while I was back at the bookshop,” Aziraphale says next to him, and it would be a confession if it weren’t so self-satisfied. “The boy made aliens, after all; I figured he could give some stars a go. I, er, know you missed them.”

“Angel,” Crowley croaks, and it’s all he can manage to say as he lowers his gaze back to Aziraphale.

“Um- this- you don’t mind, that is- do you?” Aziraphale looks at him in concern and puzzlement, and suddenly Crowley is aware he’s crying again. He laughs weakly at that, looking back at the stars, and Aziraphale rests his hand on his wrist. “If I, er, if I overstepped…”

“No,” Crowley finally manages, and he’s not sure his words will work so he grabs the angel’s hand with his own. “No, it’s wonderful, it’s…”

He doesn’t know how to describe the joy he feels. The stars are exactly as he made them, so long ago, exactly where they should be, like they never went missing with a piece of Crowley’s soul. And that Aziraphale took the time to do this for him; that Adam agreed to change this small piece of reality for him; it’s all too much, and he lets out a sob through his wide grin and squeezes Aziraphale’s hand harder in thanks.

The angel squeezes back, shuffling close to let Crowley lean against him as they watch the stars twinkle in the sky, and Crowley is sure it’s not his imagination that they’re brighter than usual. Whether it’s Adam or himself, he doesn’t know.

But he does know that if nothing else, he has Aziraphale. He has the Antichrist as a friend of sorts, and a life of his own to lead, and his garden. He has his Bentley and Queen and his sunglasses and the ability to be good, deep down inside.

And as always, he has the stars, too.


End file.
